Foucault at the Movies by Maniglier Patrice;Zabunyan Dork;

Author:Maniglier, Patrice;Zabunyan, Dork;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

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MARGUERITE DURAS

Memory Without Remembering

Michel Foucault: The idea of discussing Marguerite Duras has been worrying me somewhat since this morning. Reading her work and seeing her films always leaves me with a very strong impression. Marguerite Duras’s work remains very intensely present for me, no matter how long it is since I’ve read it, but then suddenly, as soon as I start talking about her work, I have the impression that it’s all slipping away from me. It’s like a kind of naked force that you slide up against, which your hands can’t get a grip around. It’s the presence of this force, this smooth and mobile force, this presence that is fleeting at the same time, that prevents me from speaking, and which is probably what I find attractive about it.

Hélène Cixous: I had the same kind of feeling just before. I picked up all of Marguerite Duras’s texts, which I have read several times before, thinking, naively, that I knew them well. But we can’t really know Marguerite Duras, we can’t pin her down. I say to myself, I know and I’ve read, but then I realize that I haven’t “retained” anything. That’s perhaps what it is: there is a Duras effect, and this Duras effect means that something very powerful passes through you. This is what her text is meant to do perhaps: it flows away and can’t be retained, like her characters who always drift away from themselves. So what I “retain” is this impression. This has been instructive. She has taught me something about a certain outpouring that almost goes beyond the text, even if this is an effect of writing.

I’ve wondered about the mystery of what it is in her texts that hooks you in. There are points in her texts that, for me in any case, are related to and linked to seduction: it hooks you in very strongly, it takes hold of you, it gains the upper hand. For example, one image from one of her books has really stuck with me: it’s the image of the plunging neckline of a woman’s blouse in Moderato cantabile.1 I projected a breast from which rose a flower—but I don’t know if that’s what you actually saw. My whole attention fixated on that; you reach into the woman, and you are held within her, by this flower and by this breast. And I thought, ultimately, the whole book has been written as if it was leading up to this image that really takes hold of you. So the book’s space, which at the same time is desert, sand, beach, and disintegrated life, leads us to something very small, which at the same time is tremendously valorized: it is something that is transmitted like lightning through the body and the flesh. That’s what Marguerite Duras has invented; it’s what I would call the art of poverty. Wealth and monuments are all abandoned little by little as we gradually advance through her work. I think she’s aware of

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